by maibataya
These are things that I wanted to remember. Looking back all the way to when I started fine lines, I realize how much I didn’t share, how much I didn’t care to remember. Eric, who had evoked so much emotion, hardly appears at all on here. Even the late nights, the reckless biking on highway ramps at eleven at night, the reckless driving, the spray painting—none of that is explicit on here, even though I still consider them very defining moments. Maybe that’s a good thing, I’m not sure. A lot of my first semester freshman year was left out. It was fun, and I let loose. But the specific memories themselves…I didn’t think they’d have a huge impact. And maybe they didn’t.
I’ve been in the process of tracing everything that happened, feeling things that belong to another time and place. It was a shock to see how happy Eric made me, for example. All of the good things had evaporated when he left. It was a nice reminder. Same with Jonathan. I got to remember the fun we had, and why I started to like him in the first place. I got to remember that, in the end, I wasn’t happy either, and even though I was willing to work it out over the next month before he left, he…wasn’t.
But the things that were the loudest, the things that resonated the most, were still the things with Sasha. I don’t know why he was the one who has that privilege or burden, but he is. I remember things so clearly with him; what he said, the sound of his voice, the look on his face, where we were. I still see it all, hear it all, feel it all. And that’s the hardest part. I’ve finally gotten to the point where I want to move on, but I still don’t want to forget. For the most part, these are really great memories. I don’t want to bury them. When I was reading about us together, I felt echoes of the happiness I had felt. No one at school had ever seen me that happy before, and the scary thing is, that year, beyond Sasha, was one of the happiest I’ve had. I’ve been that happy before, but never for such a sustained amount of time. When I was reading about the summer, I saw the deterioration, and in the fall, I felt numb again. I can still feel all these things.
Well, it was certainly a ride, wasn’t it.
